Conventionally, light emitted from artificial light sources such as incandescent lamps, sodium lamps or the like is irradiated upon plants in order to promote their culture. However, it is known that such incandescent lamps or sodium lamps have a number of problems such as inefficient light emission, wasteful energy consumption due to radiation in wavelengths irrelevant to the culture of plants, and excessive production of heat.
However, taking advantage of recently developed LEDs that emit the blue light necessary for plant cultivation with high brightness, it is possible to make LED array light sources that can be freely controlled to provide desired irradiating conditions concerning the color of the light emission, the stroboscopic or sequential pattern of light emission, the light intensity and so on. Furthermore, the possibility of promoting the culture of various plants and the alleviation of unwanted symptoms or stress in living organisms by making use of such LED light sources has been suggested in a number of documents (for example, refer to Japan Patent Publication No. 8-89084) and is attracting attention.
However, since the light irradiating conditions consist of multiple parameters such as the color of the light emission, its pattern, intensity and so on, and since the optimum light irradiating conditions vary according to the kind of plant, too much labor is required for an individual or a single corporation to proprietarily find the large number of required optimum light irradiating conditions. In addition, once an effective light irradiating condition is found after trial and error, if the effect is significantly beneficial, the parameters are usually treated as confidential knowledge. Furthermore, since the dissemination of such knowledge is under the control of the person or company that has expended considerable effort to develop it, there may be cases where the beneficial application of such knowledge to the general public is hindered if not rendered impossible.
Under such circumstances, the potential for the use or improvement of newly discovered techniques concerning the culturing of plants or promotion of beneficial effects in the condition of living organisms, by making use of sophisticated light sources, might be in danger of being inhibited on a large scale.
A desired main objective of the present claimed invention is to smoothly collect and proliferate data concerning the light irradiating conditions that conventionally tend to be kept secret as proprietary knowledge, and then to rapidly promote the development of new illumination conditions that are optimal for the growth and development of plants and animals, and the wellbeing of human beings.